This is a poem called a an av es. It was written by Alan Davies in 1981.

What I love about it is its disregard for any kind of traditional narrative or grammar.  It’s just a collection of euphonic words.  And as arbitrary as it seems, I get the sense that he spent a long time deciding the best order and arrangement of the words on each line, and the groupings within each stanza.  But then again, he might have spent no time at all on the composition…  And that’s what made it great for me — the poem is what it is, regardless of the construction or intended meaning.

What also struck me about it was how familiar this type of poetry seemed, and I suddenly realized that I see this type of disrupted language all the time — in my junk email folder.  It’s the seemingly random generation of a text, as a filler… as nonsense. But not gibberish.  These are real words with real meanings… it’s just the bizarre combination that makes it obviously unintelligible.  And I always thought the spam was sort of inspiring even in its vulgar mish-mash of dictionary extracts.  

But I guess it’s much different (and more interesting) when a discerning human being starts to write this way.  It becomes a game of connected sounds and rhythm, even down to the aesthetic of the letters themselves and verbal shapes they make as they are read aloud. 

Aside from the syntax of email spam, another linguistic game came to mind as I read this: the rearrangement of phrases into anagrams.  I’ve always loved that transformation, and the feeling of uncovering some secret obscurity within the letters of your everyday language.  And yes, I had so much fun with it that I ended up using the game as a heading for this website… so what??  Anyway, I get that same feeling of discovery as I read through the poem, only this time there isn’t any original phrase to deconstruct.  It’s simply a collection of phonetic harmonies with unknown origins, complete with the abrupt counterpoints which give it that sense of assemblage.  Maybe it’s based in artistic taste, maybe it’s aleatoric.  Either way, it’s definitely musical.

And in terms of composition, I’d say all poetry could be considered a form of collage… and maybe in a realm somewhere between music and graphic art.  Just the combination of words that together bring out a certain meaning.  In the case of this poem, it’s really broken down to that basic idea: bringing together words which have probably never been put together in that order… and the sounds and visual ideas that are associated with those juxtapositions are so fresh and new because of it. 

Then of course the volume of words, the sheer quantity of this collection… that spoke to me as well.  If you know me well you know I love things in multiples, little sets of slightly varied objects, etc.  So in terms of repetitive impact, I think this poem really nails it with the gravity of just so many interesting yet similar sounding words.

It was really a little epiphany in my head.  I’m thinking, why does a work of art or design have to make logical sense, why can’t it just be nice for what it is?  Maybe the act of curation doesn’t always have to provide a justified narrative… sometimes it can just present an edited arbitration for the sake of beauty.

I found a an av es at U B U W E B :: Anthology of Conceptual Writing, found via Chase. 
Also, check out more poems by Alan Davies here.

And if you toss your own phrases into this anagram maker, it’ll spit out poetry.

Brooklyn artist Alyssa Monks painted these. I was blown away when I first saw them, and even now I still can’t understand her mastery of light and water. Really some of the finest realist painting I’ve seen.

The skill is amazing, but what drew me in further was another kind of realism… the brutal, melancholic introspection that she captures, the kind of silent thought that occurs in the most intimate alone times.  During the ritual cleansing of a shower or bath, it’s that serene moment when we look at ourselves for who we really are, and have a few minutes to think about it.

Aesthetically though… they’re just so nice to look at. I’ve definitely taken time before to appreciate the smallest details of water and steam like this, but it’s another thing to try and achieve that sensation through paint on canvas.  Really impressive.

Be sure to take a look at the rest of her work here.

London-based artist Nick Gentry makes great use of discarded 3.5” floppy disks.

His arresting portraits are applied directly onto the obsolete disks, with minimal interventions of paint that reveal the colors, markings, and notes that brand each old cartridge. Certain aspects of the disks are used strategically: metal plates for eyes, colored casings for a jackets and hair, etc.

On his website, the artist describes his inspiration:

Throughout history, information has always been recorded on physical objects. Important documents, favourite songs, videos and more were stored on mountains of tapes, polaroids, cassettes and disks. As media is rapidly absorbed into the World Wide Web the rich variety of formats of the past are becoming obsolete.

This represents a big shift away from physical, real world objects, driving towards a human existence that is ultimately governed by billions of intangible data files. This release of information from the physical form allows personal data and identities to now be revealed and infinitely shared online. At the same time many of us consider individuality and privacy to be more precious than ever. Will humans be forever compatible with our own technology?

Each floppy disk used in the paintings has a history and story of its own. It represents the increasing pace of the modern life cycle, where objects are created, used and disposed of quicker than ever. To challenge this notion, as these personal artefacts of life are cast aside, the obsolete are now given new life and a renewed purpose by using them as a medium for art.

I like it a lot. And something about the colors and gritty technology makes me really want to watch Blade Runner…

A couple of fine pieces made by Anni Albers. It’s hard to tell if these were made before or after the textiles they represent — as design tests or as post documentation of the fabric itself.

Either way, so timeless… I don’t know what exactly it is about them.

What exactly makes something timeless? Is it the geometry? The restrained color of something? The fact that it is completely non-referential? Or maybe the reference is so obscure… better yet, more ordinary?

NYC-based Rosemarie Fiore has a great process. She uses live fireworks to create these intensely colorful and layered drawings. The bright gunpowder residue is sometimes guided with a long staff and sometimes contained and concentrated inside various overturned buckets.

I just found the technique really refreshing — that her relationship with such a volatile media is part precise control and part unknown. She isn’t controlling much about the paintings other than the boundaries of the colors themselves, and even those lines are often compromised by the force of the explosions.

There’s also something very primal or elemental about the way the colors are bleedng and sitting on top of each other… a burnt black spot near the center of a circle giving a subtle clue as to the colors incendiary birth. In a series of controlled palimpsests, the drawings offer hardly any reference other than the method in which they were made. In some cases the traces of making can be read even further, as you start to notice the small white dots within colored areas, marking the location of a sparkling pipe on its end.

All this evidence of the artist is lost on first glance (at least it was for me) since the pieces are so brightly confrontational. But I thought it was nice to start to understand how certain forms were made, and slowly realize different details about what went into each composition. To me that gives a very intimate record of the artists intentions, and puts the viewer right there into the moment again, as if standing alongside Rosemarie as she drew.

Anyway it’s a new type of media I for one haven’t seen before… and it definitely gives new meaning to the thought of drawing as “marks on paper”, since this canvas is literally being bombarded with color.

found at booooooom.

If you were in doubt about the power of color in the landscape… here you go.

These extraordinarily sparse graphics, made by Maria Zaikina, all depict basically the exact same scene, and yet manage to convey a huge variety of moods and places… simply by a considered palette of colors.

I was surprised at how moved I was, actually… and I think it is as a collection that they gain the most meaning as a wide survey of the seasons and times of day. This lonely structure is so easily transformed from a calm lakeside retreat, to an abandoned desert factory, to an idyllic barn in green fields, to a tropical beach cabana — all with a few choice swatches from Adobe Illustrator.

It makes me wonder how often we really notice our landscape for its detail, and how often we are just affected by the broad hue combinations in the view. How deeply ingrained is a fiery yellow wooden wall against a deep plum eastern sky at sunset, to signify a calm transition to night? What about a beach, and those three colors which remain unbroken: sand sea and sky?

I love this project, and how much it’s proven to me about the minimal pieces my brain can assemble to feel emotion. Josef Albers would be proud.

For an even better experience of this little house, check out the entire set as a slideshow, set to fast speed.  So nice.

My friend Jason from Cal Poly first introduced me to the Situationists. His architectural investigations are deeply cinematic and bring a complex dimensional montage to the constructed environment. Like his building design, his collages and prints are compositions injected with suspended, fragmented events, all superimposed as surreal escapes from convention.

So as I came across a blog post by Lebbeus Woods on the work of Situationist founder Constant Nieuwenhuys, I knew exactly why I remembered the architectural language.

Woods article outlines the roots of the Situationist International, tracing the motives of Constant and his peers. With ideas rooted in Marxism and the 20th century European artistic avant-garde, Constant (along with Guy Debord, Asger Jorn, and others) advocated experiences of life being alternative to those admitted by the capitalist order, pursuing a superior passional quality. For this purpose they suggested and experimented with the construction of situations, namely the setting up of environments favorable for the fulfillment of primitive human desires. Using methods drawn from the arts, they developed a series of experimental fields of study for the construction of such situations.

Constant Nieuwenhuys abandoned painting in 1953 to concentrate on the question of “construction”. It was to be a lifelong project based on a vision of a future society freed by a labyrinth of architectural and social spontaneity. New Babylon, as the project would be called, is “a situationist city intended as a polemical provocation.”

Lebbeus Woods brilliantly elaborates on the story of the Situationists and Constant’s work in his article, but I especially like this passage:

New Babylon was inspired by and contributed to the work of the Situationists, a group of intellectuals, theorists and writers, as well as artists who were anything but Modernists in the classic capitalist mold. …

Constant joined the Situationists early on and became their architect, much the same as Antonio Sant’Elia had done with the Futurists, half a century before. The spaces of New Babylon were intended to be spaces of disorientation and of reorientation, from rational, functionalist society to one that is liberated and self-inventing. It was meant to replace capitalist exploitation of human labor and emotion with anarchist celebration of them. Its architecture was to provide a complex armature on which could be woven endlessly new, unpredictably personal urban experiences, determined by ever-changing individual desires. In the end, however, the architecture of New Babylon seemed to overwhelm such playful, radical spontaneity by its sheer weight and monumental scale.

Heavy and sprawling as the vision may be, the work is beautiful. For me it definitely achieves the aspirations of layered and interconnected spectacle, and the creation of radical, mobile, and changeable architectural intervention in its surreal landscape.

What does New Babylon have to offer to contemporary architecture and landscape theory? A lot, I think…

Among the ideas generated by Constant, Debord, and others in the SI, the ones that resonate most with me are the concepts of psychogeography and the act of dérive (“drift”).

Debord defines psychogeography as “the study of the precise laws and specific effects of the geographical environment, consciously organized or not, on the emotions and behavior of individuals”. In other words, a playful and inventive strategy for exploring cities, as a direct consequence of the arrangement of urban stimulus. It takes pedestrians off their predictable paths and jolts them into a new awareness of the urban landscape. (a recent psychogeographic meet in New York City saw the practice of generative psychogeography, where participants followed algorithmic walking directions — “first right, second left, first left, repeat.” the results were neither goal-oriented nor random, structured but always surprising.)

By definition, psychogeography combines subjective and objective knowledge and studies. Debord struggled to articulate this theoretical paradox, and produced “Theory of the Dérive” in 1958, a document which basically acts as an instruction manual for the psychogeographic procedure, executed through the act of dérive.

“Drifting” through the built landscape, as a series of scenographic events, I think young architects today have a lot to learn from Constant and Debord, especially since we are so accustomed to the type of fluid sensory pace offered by the internet. Spontaneous interaction with the city is often the most rewarding experience I have on the street, between the vestiges of older architectural icons and institutions of “style”.

And though the internet has the tendency to degrade real sensory experience, it’s that same instantaneous interaction that can be applied to the city, through strategic — or random — arrangement of architectural events. Instead of the disconnected drift you see with the computer and it’s blogs, the urban condition offers a drift more associated with the lifestyle of the flâneur. It’s a more immersive stroll of sentience and progressive cinematic experience.

Maybe it’s a bit rediculous to imagine the earth blanketed with these deep urban webs, suspended on pillars above freeways and seas… but the ideas generated by Constant are really valuable I think, in terms of reimagining the typologies of an interconnected city. It’s not that far-fetched to consider different scales of architectural engagement… using larger, more malleable architectural frameworks to provide enriched social games at an individual level.

These images of New Bablyon are from Lebbeus Woods.

This is a piece by Dutch artist Semâ Bekirovic.

It’s just four shelves from a house that burned down, with the traces of objects that sat there at the time of the fire.

(via korut)

C-prints by Christine Nguyen.

What I like about her work (other than the fact that it’s gorgeous and natural and elemental) is that it’s right on the threshold of drawing, painting, photography, and science.

She says:

..the photo-based work is a combination of drawing and a photographic processes. “Negatives” are drawn on layers of Mylar, which are projected onto light-sensitive paper.  The paper is developed in a color processor, creating a camera-less, photographic image. What you are seeing is a negative of the drawing. I use paints, inks, pens, pencils, and also grow salt crystals on the mylar to create my drawings…

Geez. Love that process…
Just taking your work and subjecting it to the optical rigor of projected light.

Makes me wonder what other artistic works have this kind of potential when put under the darkroom enlarger.

(By the way, I think they should have commissioned her to do the opening titles for Avatar…)

It’s when you find something like this in the city that you realize how important architecture is. When it confronts you as a raw and elemental work of art, which happens to function as a useful building.

Great textures, a wonderfully graphic tree, and just the right ratio of window to wall.

…and I love how deep this place feels. Maybe in a courtyard or something, full of old growth trees, light washing down from an overcast sky across wet stucco and sparse pine.